Silvia Avendano, 52, of Santa Ana speaks at a news conference called by rent control supporters before a Santa Ana City Council study session on the matter. (Photo by Jeff Collins, the Orange County Register/SCNG)

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the deadline for rent control initiatives to qualify for the November ballot.

Tenants rights advocates in two Southern California cities missed the deadline to get rent control initiatives on the November ballot, although they still have a shot at the election cycle in 2020, city and elections officials said Friday, Aug. 3.

Santa Ana and Glendale became the fifth and sixth cities in the region to fail to get rent referendums before voters this fall. Initiative drives already failed in four other local cities: Long Beach, Pasadena, Inglewood and Pomona.

Hence, the San Diego County town of National City will be the sole Southern California jurisdiction to hold a rent control vote this fall, according to a state apartment association leader and news reports.

Petitions need to be filed and signatures verified by next Friday for Santa Ana and Glendale initiatives to qualify for a vote on Nov. 6, city and elections officials said. There’s not enough time to verify signatures, prepare staff reports and get city council action, all of which typically take a month or more.

“At this point, it’s going to be very difficult and challenging,” said Glendale City Clerk Ardy Kassakhian. “It’s very unlikely that it will qualify for the November ballot.”

Nonetheless, there’s still time for rent control initiatives in both cities to qualify for an election in 2020, city officials said.

The 180-day signature gathering period officially ends Monday in Glendale. Members of the Glendale Tenants Union planned to meet Saturday, August 4 to review their petitions to see if they have the required 10,529 signatures to qualify for a referendum in two years, said Mike Van Gorder, a tenants union member and campaign leader.

Santa Ana rent control supporters have more time because their petition drive started later. City Clerk Maria Huizar said initiative backers have until Oct. 15 to gather 9,854 signatures to qualify for the 2020 ballot — an option one campaign leader said is likely.

Renter financial woes also helped drive the effort to put Proposition 10 on this fall’s California ballot, seeking to lift some rent control restrictions. If passed, the measure would repeal the 23-year-old Costa-Hawkins Act, which bans rent control on apartments built after February 1995, as well as all houses and condos.

The proposition would apply only to jurisdictions that already have rent control or that impose it in the future.

Rent control long has been an uphill battle for California tenants.

Just 17 of California’s 539 cities and counties have rent control for apartments and about 100 have it for mobile homes.

Out of seven cities holding rent control votes in 2016 and 2017, initiatives passed in just two.

The difficulty such initiatives have qualifying speaks less about support for rent control than the challenges faced by grassroots campaigns with limited funding, supporters said.

“The issue is not rent control. The issue is how difficult it is to participate in our democracy as an average citizen,” said D’Artagnan Scorza, executive director of the Social Justice Learning Institute, a member of the Uplift Inglewood coalition. “You need money to play.”

Van Gorder of the Glendale Tenants Union echoed that sentiment. He estimated his group would need $60,000 for a solid initiative drive but had to rely on a few thousand in donations, donated legal assistance and volunteer signature gatherers.

Technical difficulties, such as whether the petition was properly published also can hang up a campaign, Scorza said.

Scorza said Uplift Inglewood turned in more than 14,000 signatures, but the city clerk invalidated many of them because the signers were not registered voters, address changes and other technical problems.

“It is the nature of signature gathering when you have volunteers and you’re bootstrapping an effort,” he said.

For more than a decade, Jeff Collins has followed housing and real estate, covering market booms and busts and all aspects of the real estate industry. He has been tracking rents and home prices, and has explored solutions to critical problems such as Southern California’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. Before joining the Orange County Register in 1990, he covered a wide range of topics for daily newspapers in Kansas, El Paso and Dallas. A Southern California native, he studied at UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. He later earned a master’s degree from the USC School of Journalism.